News

We are pleased to announce that Šejla Kamerić‘s exhibition EX YOU opens today at Fotografiska Tallinn, Estonia, at 6 PM, with a guided tour led by Heikki Leis and Šejla Kamerić.

On view until: 7 March 2027
Cocktails & Conversation: Šejla Kamerić & Elise Rohtmets, 9 October, 7 PM

Bosnian artist Šejla Kamerić explores the burdens passed down to women through generations and the possibility of breaking free from them and reclaiming one’s own story. Through photography, sculpture, installation, and sound, Kamerić examines memory, identity, and belonging, using her own body as a site of resistance and self-determination. The exhibition title refers both to personal experience and to the former Yugoslavia, or “ex-YU” – a place that has politically ceased to exist but continues to live on in cultural memory – asking what we carry with us from the past, what we are able to leave behind, and what remains.

Exploring Identity, Freedom, and the Politics of Belonging
Born in the former Yugoslavia, Kamerić’s life and artistic vision have been profoundly shaped by war and its aftermath. In EX YOU, personal history becomes intertwined with wider questions of gender, power, memory, and belonging. The title itself carries a double meaning: it evokes both ex-Yugoslavia and the experience of being “exed” – excluded from belonging, control, or even ownership of one’s own body and image.

At the heart of the exhibition is the female body and the narratives imposed upon it. Kamerić turns the gaze back on these expectations, questioning the roles, ideals, and inherited structures that continue to define what a woman should be. Using her own body and image, she transforms self-representation into an act of resistance – a way of reclaiming the right to decide how one is seen and who one is allowed to become.

Her works move between vulnerability and defiance, visibility and disappearance, the deeply personal and the collective. Rather than offering simple answers, EX YOU creates a space where identities remain in motion and where the past is not something left behind, but something that continues to shape the present.

“This exhibition is deeply personal. Its about transition, freedom of choice, it’s about political, social and personal rejection. Identities are not simple and they are not fixed positions, identity is a process of becoming”, says Šejla Kamerić.

“Until I was a young teenager, I felt uncomfortable being a girl – I wanted to be a boy. I understood that boys had more freedom, and the path society built for a female child was not something I felt comfortable with. I recognized from an early age that it’s not something I fit into. Now I use my body and my voice as a woman to speak about that.”

Through this deeply personal starting point, Kamerić opens up questions that reach far beyond her own experience. What do we inherit from the generations before us? Who has the power to define our identity? And what happens when we begin to reject the roles and expectations handed to us?